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Abstract: Civil society aid has become a sizeable industry since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. As part of this project, building nonprofit sectors has burgeoned into a transnational initiative to cement the transition away from state socialism to market democracy. How have change agents propagated a new form of organizational activity to build nonprofit sectors in formally one-party and one-sector states? The dissertation reconstructs the emergence and spread of the institutional project of civil society development in Hungary as it follows the flow of ideas, organizational forms and charitable dollars from American foundations to recipients in Hungary. It draws on in-depth qualitative interviews, field and organizational observations in the United States and Hungary, survey and archival data of Hungarian nonprofit organizations, and data on U.S. foundation grantmaking to Hungary from 1975 to 2004 to analyze the global institutional project of post-communist civil society development.

I argue that a mechanistic model of diffusion cannot adequately explain how civil society as an institution-building target spreads across national boundaries. This global institutional project emerged organically through the convergence of collective organizational action to realize divergent interests and visions. Fuelled by the discourse of civil society in Eastern Europe, over time a core group of U.S. foundations converged their programming into a set of prescriptions, techniques and philanthropic vehicles, and facilitated the emergence of a local field of civil society development: metaorganizations committed to providing assistance for nonprofit and civil society growth. Hungarian institutional entrepreneurs built on local cognitive-cultural schemes and organizational models, some with origins in communist Hungary, and linked them to institutional logics and models indigenous to the American polity. American foundations’ theorizing and framing helped sell their project in post-communist countries and entrench the tripartite model of social order—the state, the market and nonprofit sectors. Both sending and receiving organizations engaged in sensemaking and strategic action to shape the transmission of ideas and organizational forms that facilitated the transnational spread of the nonprofit sector, albeit in a reconstructed form.

Keywords: civil society development; infrastructure organizations; nonprofit sector; post-communism; Hungary; institutional entrepreneurship; civil society aid; American foundations

Language: English

344 pages, May 17, 2009

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RePEc:hhh:senior:2009_149

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